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Some GOP lawmakers said the views Kent expressed in his resignation letter were antisemitic, with Rep. Don Bacon writing on social media, “Good riddance. Anti-Semitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell echoed a similar sentiment as he criticized the “virulent anti-Semitism of his resignation letter.”

Kent has little in common with the prominent Democrats who’ve voiced opposition to the war. He has faced criticism in the past for associations with far-right figures, including White nationalists and a Nazi sympathizer.

But his resignation — against the backdrop of fierce tumult over the war in the MAGA movement and among conservative media figures — shows that if the president has to fear a political revolt over the war, it could come from his right.

This is potentially an important factor for a president who traditionally tries to avoid breaks with his base.

Kent’s resignation also points to the lasting impact of a comment by Rubio this month that the US preemptively went to war because it believed Israel was about to attack and Iran would respond by attacking American forces.

Trump denied he was rushed into war and insists he was more gung-ho than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While polls show many Republican voters retain faith in Trump, signs of base dissent are important because the war is already unpopular with a majority of voters. And many past American wars have been undermined by the country turning against them.

Days after demanding US allies send ships to help open the Strait of Hormuz, he insisted he’d never wanted them. “I didn’t do a full-court press because I think if I did, they probably would be, but we don’t need help,” he said.

Asked whether he was worried that Iran could become another Vietnam War-style debacle if he puts troops on the ground, Trump replied “No, I’m not afraid … I’m really not afraid of anything.”

Another reporter asked Trump if he had a plan for the day after military action ends. “We have a lot,” he said, although he’s never specified any. “If we left right now, it would take 10 years for them to rebuild. But we’re not ready to leave yet, but we’ll be leaving in the near future.”

Trump has offered sometimes contradictory reasons for waging war. He’s suggested Iran was an imminent threat to the US without offering evidence. He implied he was after regime change when he launched the assault, but has since played down the possibility of a popular revolt in Iran.

On Monday, the president fueled new concerns that he was not fully convinced in his own mind why he went to war. He denied his rationale was over oil, but added the following elliptical comment.

“We don’t need it, but we did it. It’s almost — you could say we did it out of habit, which is not a good thing to do. But we did it because we have some good allies there.”

Trump has created further confusion by repeatedly claiming the war is already won, while simultaneously arguing that it’s too soon to bring American troops home. He’s said he will know when it’s time in his “bones.”

His trust in his own almost mystical intuition has carried him through no end of personal, business and political scrapes. But it represents another risky bet as consequential and potentially painful moments loom in the war.

As Mark Milley once said, Trump is a guy who can eliminate anyone who gets in his way.”

#trump #business #empire #eliminate #hormuz

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#bolton #interview

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Trump sold “Trumpism” as a mix of swagger, risk-taking, and cheap gas. Iran has just stress-tested all three — and they’re cracking.
​
CNN’s analysis is blunt: Tehran’s resistance has turned what Trump promised as a fast, punishing war into a grinding stalemate, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively shut, oil and gas prices soaring, and the White House scrambling after a scenario its own planners treated as “worst case” but never really prepared for. He was blindsided by the severity of Iran’s retaliation across the Gulf and by the closure of a choke point every serious analyst had flagged from day one. His attempt to turn Hormuz into a loyalty exam for allies has stalled; NATO and key partners refused to send ships into a war they weren’t consulted on, leaving Trump ranting that he never really needed them anyway.

At home, the bill is arriving. Oil has blown past 100 dollars, gas has jumped almost a dollar a gallon in weeks, markets are shaking, and a war that’s already unpopular with a majority of voters is now fuelling an internal revolt — including the resignation of a prominent MAGA-aligned national security official. Polls still show Republican loyalty, but dissent inside his base is growing as he offers contradictory lines like “we’ve won in many ways” and “we haven’t won enough,” and refuses to say when the war ends or what “victory” even means if Hormuz stays blocked and Iran keeps its enriched uranium. The whole premise of Trumpism — big threats, bigger improvisation, and faith that the public will tolerate any risk as long as he projects strength — is being tested against the one thing it can’t bluff: sustained pain in wallets and a visible lack of control.
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For the US itself, the rational interest is obvious and the opposite of Trump’s instincts: stop feeding a long, expensive Middle East war that Iran can prolong and weaponize through oil, and get out with the lowest possible military, economic, and political cost. Every extra week of escalation makes it harder to fake a clean “win,” and easier for Tehran to prove that the real stress test wasn’t for Iran at all — it was for the idea that America can keep gambling on forever wars and never pay the price at home.

#IranWar #Trump #Trumpism #Hormuz #oil #gasprices #NATO #USA #geopolitics #warCost

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Netanyahu finally got his dream war with US backing — and may have picked the perfect moment to lose America for good.

Bloomberg’s analysis calls Trump’s decision to launch a joint campaign with Israel against Iran the “crowning achievement” of Netanyahu’s decades-long project: ditch bipartisan consensus, bind Israel’s fate to the hard‑right base of the Republican Party, and turn US–Israel relations into a culture‑war brand.

But like the attack on Iran itself, it’s a short‑term win glued to long‑term damage. Support for Israel has already cratered among US Democrats and is sliding even among Republicans; new polls show Democratic voters now tilting more toward Palestinians, with generational numbers that are devastating for Israel’s image.

Among younger Americans, especially under 35, “unfavorable” is fast becoming the default setting.

The Iran war pours gasoline on this trend. It sharpens the generational split inside the GOP, where older evangelicals still see Israel as sacred, while younger conservatives are tired of endless wars and trillion‑dollar guarantees.

On the fringes of both parties, criticism of Israel slides into open antisemitism, and Bloomberg warns that this conflict is already raising the risk of attacks on Jewish institutions in the US.

That’s the poisoned dividend of Netanyahu’s strategy: by turning support for Israel into a partisan loyalty test and wrapping it around Trumpism, he also ties Jewish safety and legitimacy to the most polarizing current in American politics.

Meanwhile the material cost of this “victory” is brutal. The US–Israel war with Iran is rattling global markets and investors, driving up energy prices, disrupting trade routes and threatening global growth with tens of billions in losses; for the US and Israel, the military tab alone is running into the billions, day after day.

For now, Netanyahu can boast on friendly Israeli TV that he got America into the war from day one and out‑Churchilled Churchill by dragging his superpower patron in at the start.

But as US public support erodes, Democrats harden, young voters radicalize and even some Republicans flinch at the cost, that triumph looks more like a Pyrrhic win: he beat Trump in the room — and may end up sacrificing Israel’s standing in the country that bankrolls his wars.

#Israel #Netanyahu #Trump #IranWar #USA #Democrats #Republicans #publicOpinion #antisemitism #geopolitics #warCost

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War Comes Home: Unidentified Drones Over DC Are Making the Iran War Feel Very Local

Unidentified drones are now buzzing over the DC base where Rubio and Hegseth sleep — and suddenly the Iran war doesn’t feel so “over there” anymore.

Fort McNair, the cozy Washington post that houses the National Defense University and now an unusual cluster of Trump officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, recorded multiple unknown drones overhead on a single night in the past 10 days. The sightings triggered tighter security, internal White House discussions about whether to relocate them, and came as other installations — Joint Base McGuire‑Dix‑Lakehurst in New Jersey and MacDill Air Force Base in Florida — jumped to Force Protection Condition Charlie, one step below the highest alert.

At the same time, the State Department has ordered all US diplomatic posts worldwide to immediately review security and convene emergency action committees, citing “the ongoing and developing situation in the Middle East and the potential for spillover effects.” Several embassies in the region have already been drawn down, and Americans in multiple Middle Eastern countries have been told to “depart now via commercial means” because of escalating Iranian retaliation and copycat threats. What started as “Operation Epic Fury” over Iran is now bleeding into suspicious packages at Centcom’s headquarters, shelter‑in‑place orders at MacDill, and drone scares above the capital’s skyline.

None of this proves Iran is directly behind the drones over Fort McNair. Officials admit they don’t know where they came from and have not publicly linked them to Tehran. But it fits a pattern that predates this war: US agencies say Iran has explored drone and assassination plots against high‑profile American targets since the Soleimani strike, and the Secret Service has chased unexplained drones around Trump’s entourage before. When you move your top foreign‑policy and war cabinet into a base without a big security buffer, and then go to war with a state that specializes in asymmetric retaliation, “unidentified drones” stop reading like local weirdness and start looking like a preview.

#IranWar #Trump #Rubio #Hegseth #FortMcNair #drones #USA #security #EpicFury #geopolitics

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Treasury just quietly admitted what the headlines won’t: Trump’s “maximum pressure” war on Iran is now so costly that Washington is considering unsanctioning Iranian oil to keep the global economy from seizing up.

The administration is scrambling to plug a crisis it helped trigger. After US–Israeli strikes on Iran and Iran’s retaliation across the Gulf, attacks on Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG terminal, refineries in Kuwait, export infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and gas sites in the UAE have pushed Brent to around $118 a barrel and sent European gas prices up as much as 30 percent in a day.

Qatar’s energy chief says almost a fifth of the country’s LNG export capacity is offline and could take three to five years to rebuild. In response, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is now talking about “unsanctioning” roughly 140 million barrels of Iranian oil already afloat and tapping US reserves again — a public U‑turn from punishing Iran’s barrels to begging them into the market.

At the same time, the Pentagon has dropped a 200‑billion‑dollar funding request for the Iran war on the White House, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shrugging that “it takes money to kill bad guys” and adding that even this number “could move.”

Last week, the US already lifted sanctions on Russian oil currently at sea and allowed Iranian‑linked tankers and companies to carry and sell that Russian crude to help ease prices — effectively outsourcing part of the energy fix to the very networks it claims to be fighting.

Iran, for its part, is done pretending this is limited. Its foreign minister Abbas Araghchi is promising “ZERO restraint” if Iranian energy infrastructure is hit again, while Tehran keeps firing back across Gulf facilities and watching panic ripple through markets.

Yet from the Pentagon podium, Hegseth insists the US is “winning decisively and on our terms,” refuses to give any timeline for the war’s end, and leaves the impression of a superpower that has to buy its way out of the energy blowback it unleashed.

So the picture is brutally simple: every new strike on oil and gas sites adds another dollar to the barrel, another line to a 200‑billion‑dollar war tab, and another twist in the logic that says America must keep bombing Iran while quietly putting Iranian and Russian barrels back on the balance sheet to keep the lights on.

#IranWar #Trump #oil #gas #energyCrisis #Hormuz #Qatar #Russia #sanctions #warCost

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Orbán just turned the EU’s “unshakeable support for Ukraine” into a very simple transaction: no Russian oil, no 90‑billion‑euro lifeline.

At today’s and tomorrow’s summit in Brussels, EU leaders are scrambling to unblock a €90 billion loan for Kyiv while Hungary calmly holds the off switch. Budapest has vowed to keep its veto in place until Russian crude starts flowing again through the Druzhba pipeline that crosses Ukraine into Hungarian and Slovak refineries — ideally before Hungary’s April 12 elections. Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Viktor Orbán have been crystal clear for weeks: as long as Ukraine “obstructs” Druzhba, Hungary will obstruct Ukraine’s “war loan,” and they “will not be intimidated.”
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Brussels, desperate to keep the Ukraine project on life support, is now offering Orbán exactly what he wants. EU officials are dangling EU‑funded repairs of the damaged Druzhba segment on Ukrainian territory, EU‑financed inspections, and political “off‑ramp” language so that he can claim victory at home while quietly dropping the veto. Kyiv, which spent two years urging Europe to stop buying Russian energy, is being pushed to let cheap Kremlin oil cross its territory again so that the same Europe can send borrowed money back to Kyiv with blue‑and‑yellow flags on it.

Orbán, meanwhile, plays the bad cop for his own voters: he promises to block tens of billions in Ukraine aid until Hungary’s energy security is restored, accuses Kyiv of economic blackmail, taps strategic reserves, and dares Brussels to punish him in the middle of an election campaign. EU leaders call it “disloyalty” and an “exploitation of unanimity,” but their behavior says the opposite: they will bend rules, invent legal detours and pay for a Russian‑oil pipeline just to avoid admitting that the war‑and‑sanctions grand strategy hit a wall.
​
So the picture is simple and ugly. On paper, this summit is about heroic Western solidarity with Ukraine. In practice, it’s about one leader from Budapest openly trading that solidarity for barrels of Russian crude, and a nervous EU trying to buy him off fast enough to keep the façade intact.

#EU #Hungary #Orban #Ukraine #Druzhba #oil #Russia #Brussels #cheapGas #war #geopolitics

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#hegseth #trump

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#netanyahu #iran

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Erdogan’s Big War FOMO

The biggest Middle East war in a decade began without Erdogan — and that’s his real defeat. Israel and the US hit Iran, oil routes are burning, the regional map is shifting, and Ankara found out from the news ticker, not a secure Washington–Ankara line. Turkey is NATO’s second‑largest army, host to US nukes, self‑styled mediator — and in this war its role is reduced to silent airspace where NATO intercepts Iranian missiles.

Alliance air defenses have already shot down multiple Iranian rockets over Turkey. Officially, Ankara is “not part of the conflict”; in reality, it’s participating without a say. Iranian gas delivers billions of cubic meters a year and props up Turkey’s economy, but the war is shredding both energy flows and the informal Kurdish bargain, while in Syria Erdogan’s protégé rules only inside the lines drawn by Israeli airstrikes, not Turkish diplomacy.

Erdogan’s project relied on an illusion: NATO pillar and Islamic world leader at the same time; dependent on Iranian gas yet marketed as Tehran’s counterweight. The war exposed that as posture, not strategy. Gulf monarchies quietly live with strikes on Iran without any Turkish “umbrella,” the Palestinian card that built Erdogan’s image has been drowned out by a larger security re‑order, and key decisions are being made with no seat for Ankara.

A regional leader is the one you cannot start a war without. Today, Erdogan is just another spectator watching this one unfold in real time.

#Turkey #Erdogan #IranWar #NATO #Syria #Kurds #oil #gas #MiddleEast #fakeLeadership

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Dollar’s Iran War Hangover

The dollar is taking a hit, and it’s not because the Fed suddenly got soft — it’s because everyone else decided to go full hawk once Trump set the Middle East on fire. Since the US–Israel war on Iran began and Brent shot roughly 50% higher, markets have flipped from pricing Fed cuts to assuming the Fed just freezes in place while Europe, Britain, Japan and even Australia talk, hint, or move toward hikes.

The result: euro, yen, sterling, Swiss franc and Aussie all gain on the week, while the dollar index posts its biggest weekly drop since January — even as traders warn that if the war drags on, the greenback will come back as a classic “safe haven” riding US energy exports and global fear.

In Brussels and London, central bankers are suddenly rediscovering inflation. The ECB held rates but all but admitted that energy‑driven price pressure means hikes are back on the table; markets now fully price at least one move by June. The Bank of England did the same “on hold but ready to strike” routine and promptly triggered a rout in short‑dated gilts as traders shoved in roughly 80 basis points of tightening by year‑end.

The Bank of Japan, long the global dove, left the door open to a hike as soon as April, giving the yen a rare boost as carry‑traders blinked. Australia simply skipped the winks and raised again, its second hike in two months.

Washington, meanwhile, is stuck in a classic Trump‑era contradiction. The Fed sits on its hands because Powell has no idea how deep the war damage will go, money markets have killed off hopes of rate cuts but haven’t priced hikes, and at the same time the administration is begging Saudi Arabia and Israel not to push Iran’s energy network over a cliff while openly considering unsanctioning Iranian barrels and already relaxing restrictions on Russian oil at sea.

LNG in the Gulf gets hit, the world’s largest gas complex is “crippled,” crude flirts with $120, and the supposed king currency of the system spends a week being marked down because everyone else is hiking to pay for Trump’s freedom‑of‑navigation cosplay.

The punchline for a Telegram feed is simple: the war Trump sold as strength is now rewriting global rate expectations, making Europe and Asia look tougher than the Fed on inflation, and briefly knocking the dollar down — while every serious strategist quietly adds the same caveat.

If this conflict drags on and the shock gets bigger, the dollar doesn’t die; it comes back stronger as the world’s favorite panic asset, backed by US oil and a war bill that someone will eventually have to pay.

#IranWar #Trump #dollar #Fed #ECB #BoE #BoJ #RBA #FX #oil #gas #energyCrisis #markets #warCost #fakeStability

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The European Union Built a Sanctions Trap — Then Fell In

The Iran war just exposed how badly the EU misplayed its “values‑based” energy strategy. First Brussels banned Russian hydrocarbons, then the US–Israel war in the Gulf knocked out up to a fifth of global oil and gas flows and sent prices into 1970s‑style shock territory.

While Washington scrambles to unsanction Russian and even Iranian barrels to calm markets, Emmanuel Macron lectures Trump for lifting sanctions — as if moral posture can keep European steel, chemicals, and machinery running without affordable fuel.

In reality, Europe has swapped one dependency for another. After cutting pipeline gas from Moscow, the bloc has become deeply hooked on US LNG: by 2025, about 57% of EU LNG imports came from the US, nearly four times the 2021 share, and some analysts warn that share could rise toward 80% by 2030.

American gas is the most expensive option on the menu, but long‑term contracts and a political “freedom gas” narrative lock European buyers in, tying their industrial base to a single high‑cost supplier across the Atlantic. That’s not sovereignty; that’s a different flag on the same leash.
​

Now the Gulf war piles on. Tanker traffic through Hormuz is crippled, Middle Eastern production is being shut in as storage fills, and the EIA has slashed expectations for inventory builds while jacking up its near‑term oil price outlook.

Europe, which killed off Russian volumes and over‑indexed on US LNG without finishing its transition, is sitting in the blast zone: higher input costs, threatened heavy industry, and governments more focused on scolding Washington than on admitting that their own sanctions architecture left them with no cheap fallback.

So yes, the headline from Atlantico lands: the EU is trapped by its own sanctions. It weaned itself off Putin’s gas only to become addicted to overpriced American LNG, bet on a fragile Gulf status quo, and now faces an energy shock it can’t solve without crawling back to the very suppliers it spent years demonizing — or watching its industrial core slowly deindustrialize.

#EU #energy #sanctions #Russia #IranWar #Macron #LNG #USA #Germany #industry #oil #gas #geopolitics

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Brussels Writes the Check, Orbán Holds the Valve

Hungary just hit the brakes on €90 billion for Ukraine — again — and this time Italy quietly tapped the brakes too.

At the Brussels summit, Viktor Orbán and Slovakia formally blocked the EU decision to approve the €90 billion “loan” for Kyiv, tying their veto directly to Ukraine’s de facto oil blockade on the Druzhba pipeline. Orbán told reporters Hungary has a clear legal right to torpedo the package until Russian crude starts flowing again, stressing that Budapest approved the loan in December and only got hit with a pipeline shutdown after giving its word:

“I cannot pretend nothing happened.”

Ursula von der Leyen responded by promising to pay Zelensky anyway. She repeated her now-standard line that the €90 billion loan

“will happen one way or another”

and vowed that the Commission will find legal and budgetary workarounds to deliver the money despite Hungary’s veto — effectively threatening to route around one member state using alternative EU mechanisms or a coalition-of-the-willing structure. Translation: the political promise to Ukraine comes first, the formal unanimity rule comes second.

The twist came from Rome. Behind closed doors, Giorgia Meloni told fellow leaders she still backs swift aid for Kyiv but “understands” Orbán’s position, calling it “normal” given Hungary’s elections and the Druzhba dispute — and even saying that in his place she would see it the same way. For Brussels, that’s a nightmare sentence: one of the few right‑wing leaders still seen as loyal to the EU line openly legitimizing the blackmail logic — no oil, no money.

So you get the real picture behind the summit communiqués. Officially, the EU is united, furious at Budapest, and “unwavering” on Ukraine. In practice, one government is openly trading the future of Kyiv for cheap Russian crude, another is saying it understands, and the Commission is promising to raid the EU budget to keep paying Zelensky even if the politics and the energy flows say the project is already cracking.

#EU #Hungary #Orban #Ukraine #vonderLeyen #Meloni #Druzhba #oil #Russia #Brussels #war #geopolitics

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#netanyahu #iran #operation

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Macron’s Hormuz Panic Pivot

Macron spent the week insisting France would “never” take part in Trump’s Hormuz operation — and then, the moment markets and the White House reacted, he sprinted to the UN, NATO and Downing Street begging for a plan to reopen the strait. Publicly, he sells it as high principle: France won’t join a US war, but will “explore ways” to secure Hormuz under a UN flag and a broader coalition once the bombing stops. In reality, he’s trying to retro‑fit a multilateral fig leaf over a simple truth: Europe needs that shipping lane open, doesn’t want to admit Trump was right about the risk, and definitely doesn’t want to be seen as freeloading on US naval power again.
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In London, Keir Starmer is playing the adult in the room, calling NATO chief Mark Rutte and Macron to coordinate on “a viable plan” to reopen Hormuz — while carefully stressing it won’t be a NATO mission but some wider mix of Gulf states, Europeans and the US. Translation: everyone wants the oil corridor back, no one wants to sign their navy up under Trump’s banner, and Macron suddenly needs the alliance and the UN as political cover after grandstanding about staying out.

So you get the picture: Paris tried to score points as the brave refuser, then watched energy prices and Trump’s temper spike, and is now frantically pitching a UN‑branded, not‑quite‑NATO, not‑quite‑US plan to fix the same problem it refused to touch two days ago.
​
#Macron #France #Trump #Starmer #NATO #UN #Hormuz #IranWar #oil #shipping #geopolitics #fakeAutonomy

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Israel’s War Dividend: The Energy Corridor Gambit

Netanyahu just said the quiet part out loud: this war isn’t only about “security,” it’s about rewriting the region’s energy map so oil and gas flow through Israel — and everyone pays a toll.

At a Jerusalem presser, right after Israel hit Iran’s South Pars field and Iran answered by smashing Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG hub and Gulf refineries, he floated the “solution”: just run oil and gas pipelines across the Arabian Peninsula straight to Israeli ports on the Med and you’re “forever” free of Hormuz. In the middle of a forced shutdown of roughly 16 million barrels a day through the strait and years of lost Qatari gas, Israel is pitching itself as the new regional tap.

The wild part is it’s not wild. Israel already has the Eilat–Ashkelon line, built to move Iranian crude in the Shah era, with capacity around 1.2 million barrels a day from the Red Sea to the Med. Saudi Arabia already has the East–West Petroline, up to 7 million barrels a day to Yanbu on the Red Sea, now running flat out because Hormuz is half‑choked. Between Yanbu’s hinterland and Eilat sits one missing link of pipe and one missing piece of paperwork called “normalization.” In wartime marketing language: not a betrayal of the ummah, just a rescue package for the global economy.

On gas, the same logic applies. Leviathan and Tamar pump roughly 23 bcm a year, heading above 30, under a 130‑bcm mega‑deal with Egypt that runs to 2040. Some of that gas keeps Egypt’s lights on as domestic output falls; the rest is liquefied and sold to Europe as “Mediterranean diversification.” Every damaged train at Ras Laffan quietly boosts the leverage of an Israel–Egypt combo that can still load tankers.

For Washington, this is where doctrine meets blowback. The 2026 National Defense Strategy describes Israel as a “model ally” that can act autonomously with “critical but limited” US backing, but builds no real mechanism to stop that ally from crossing American risk lines. Israel hits the biggest gas field on earth; Trump says he “wasn’t informed” and urges Jerusalem to stop striking Iranian energy, because every drone over a gas plant detonates in global inflation and his re‑election math. That’s not supervision; that’s the principal watching his agent bet the balance sheet.

The winners‑and‑losers grid behind this is harsh. The Shia axis — Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias — loses infrastructure, revenue, and the credibility to brandish “energy chaos” as a threat. A Saudi–Emirati core walks away with a potential Hormuz‑free export route, deeper roles in IMEC and I2U2, and a chance to plug into an Israel‑centric pipeline and port network — if they swallow normalization at the right price. Qatar, the gas ATM of the old order, loses about 17% of its LNG capacity and maybe $20 billion a year, and suddenly looks more dependent on US security guarantees than on its own checkbook. Turkey, the self‑styled Sunni command center, is pushed to the margins: less Iranian gas, higher domestic prices, no seat in IMEC, a hotter Kurdish file and fewer Qatari dollars feeding its pet networks.

Netanyahu’s pipeline line is not an offhand fantasy; it’s an opening bid. For Riyadh, it frames normalization as a trade for a unique, choke‑point‑free route that no one else can offer. For Washington, it promises that some of the war’s costs might be cashed out later as a more resilient, Israel‑anchored supply architecture. For Europe, it signals that the serious overland alternative to missiles and Houthis is a Gulf–Israel–Mediterranean corridor, not a neat bypass around Israeli soil. Even if no extra pipe is buried tomorrow, the narrative has moved: Israel isn’t just another frontline state under fire — it’s trying to turn the whole energy crisis into a toll route with its name on it.

#Israel #IranWar #energy #oil #gas #Hormuz #SaudiArabia #Qatar #Turkey #IMEC #Netanyahu #geopolitics #warDividend

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“Not America’s War”: Oman Calls Time on Trump’s Adventure

Oman’s foreign minister just did what almost no US “ally” dares: he said Trump’s Iran war is a mistake America needs help escaping, not a crusade anyone should be joining.

He calls the campaign the administration’s “greatest miscalculation,” says the US has “lost control of its own foreign policy,” and insists flatly: “This is not America’s war.”

There is, he argues, no realistic scenario where both Israel and the US get what they want; regime change in Tehran would mean a long, bloody ground campaign and exactly the kind of endless war Trump once promised to end, not restart.

Coming from Oman — the quiet mediator that hosted back-channel US–Iran talks and now eats Iranian drones around its own ports — that’s not rhetoric, it’s a survival memo.

The state that literally shares the Strait of Hormuz with Iran is saying: the war is killing Muslims, wrecking the regional economy, and there is no “mission accomplished” ending for Washington here.

Thousands are already dead in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza; Hormuz has been intermittently strangled; Gulf energy and ports have been hit from Qatar to Oman; and every new strike pushes the region deeper into the same chaos Trump once used as a cautionary tale against his predecessors.

When even Oman starts asking America’s friends to pull Washington out of its own war, it’s not just the Muslim world paying in blood — it’s the whole idea of an orderly US-made Middle East that is collapsing alongside it.

#Oman #IranWar #Trump #USA #Israel #Hormuz #Gulf #endlessWars #MiddleEast #geopolitics

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Seoul Reads the Room — and the Sanctions

South Korea just did what a serious government does in an energy war: it quietly opened the door to Russian crude and naphtha to keep the lights on while the Middle East burns.

Seoul’s industry ministry says it’s talking with refiners about importing Russian oil and feedstock now that sanctions have been softened, explicitly linking the move to securing stable supplies as the Iran war chokes Gulf flows. That’s not ideology, that’s survival economics.

If Washington’s own policy shift means Russian barrels are back on the menu, only a fool would keep paying more for less in the name of a sanctions regime even the architect is walking away from. By exploring Russian crude, Seoul is signalling a simple rule that Brussels and some others still refuse to say out loud: energy security comes before performative virtue.

If the US president is loosening the screws on Moscow, the rational response for every other capital is to stop pretending this is 2022 and start buying what keeps their industry and citizens alive.

#SouthKorea #Russia #oil #naphtha #sanctions #IranWar #energy #Trump #geopolitics

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